"Dr Jeff's" own experiential and anecdotal history of the genesis of Silicon Valley from Shockley to year 2000, with focus on AMD and its storied rivalry with Intel. click here to read

Another view of the genesis of Silicon Valley and the entire chip industry produced by the San Jose Mercury News in honor of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor in 2009.

A very interesting history of the founding of Motorola as a seminal electronics company.click here to read

Many PBS TV stations broadcast a 90 minute American Experience video on the early history of Silicon Valley made for WGBH Boston. Jerry Sanders and many others from the early Fairchild days are featured in the story.

Former AMD executive David Laws has been an instrumental contributor to the the Computer History Museum. From Dave Laws: "The Museum provided many of the images, and I spent several hours fact checking the commentary for the producers. It was a star-studded evening with Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, and many of the usual Valley suspects in attendance. Andy Grove's presence was especially poignant. In view of his rapid decline from Parkinson's Disease, he was extremely brave to consent to be interviewed for the story. I had the pleasure of reintroducing Gordon Moore to his 1957 patent notebook that I am in the process of reviewing for the Museum.

some pictures from that show are shown in the slideshow below, along with a few others

Moore's Law has ruled semiconductor processing and die shrinks ever since the founding of Intel in 1968. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is credited with observing that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 2 years.

This translates into a process shrink of geometry by square root of 2 every 2 years. That is, feature sizes on a chip are divided by 1.414 for each subsequent process, and process shrinks have occurred on average every 2 years. This is an average, not a firm rule. For example, a process that would be shrunk in 4 years would have its feature sizes divided by 2x square root of 2.

The industry has been amazed that this "law" or principle has indeed been observed to hold for over 40 years, even though its demise was long ago predicted.(pictured: Gordon Moore)